


Coffee Morning & other ficlets

by Clodius Pulcher (Clodia)



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-11
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-06 05:19:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5404496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clodia/pseuds/Clodius%20Pulcher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1. Maxine Angelis and Zoe Morgan catch up for coffee (S2).<br/>2. Nicholas Donnelly has his own CIA contacts, because of course he does. Much good will that do him. (2x12, 'Prisoner's Dilemma'.)<br/>3. Shaw digests that.  “So, wait,” she says.  “I’m not allowed to take shots to centre mass, but you’re allowed to dissolve people?  That doesn’t seem fair.” (Early S3.)<br/>4. After Kara catches John Reese pulling out Daniel Casey’s teeth and is obliged to shoot both of them and dump their bodies in the river, she gets a new partner on temporary secondment from the ISA. (AU from 3x16, 'RAM'.)<br/>5. Zoe's used to John turning up in different disguises. That's why it's the second time she runs into Detective Riley that throws her. (S4, somewhere between 4x14, 'Guilty', and 4x19, 'Search and Destroy'.)<br/>6. One of these days, Iris is going to have to deal with the fact that what she doesn't know about John Riley is just as important as what she does know. It'll probably have to wait until after he gets out of hospital, though. (Tag to 4x20, 'Terra Incognita'.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Coffee Morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maxine Angelis and Zoe Morgan catch up for coffee (Season 2).

Maxine Angelis and Zoe Morgan finally catch up for coffee on Tuesday morning two weeks before Christmas. It’s raining and Maxine’s late, because she’s been chasing leads on a new story since Sunday night, but the café’s decked out in baubles and tinsel and there’s the lady of the hour tapping at her phone in an armchair by the window, wearing a flat, focused expression that tells Maxine she’s on the job. She doesn’t look like she walked here. Maxine shakes off her coat, feeling the water dripping down her neck, and Zoe’s phone vanishes with a smile and an easy greeting. They sit down together. Maxine orders espresso and the biggest slice of chocolate cake available. She’s been looking forward to this for weeks.

It’s not an interview. They talk about the weather, then the café, then a couple of politicians Maxine hadn’t been able to pin anything on up to now. She’s not dumb enough to think Zoe Morgan gives away freebies or gets loose-lipped about her clients, so if Zoe throws anyone to the wolves there must be some other business behind it, but dirt is dirt and Maxine doesn’t much care what Zoe’s up to as long as her tips pan out. Besides, maybe if Maxine digs deep enough she’ll find the misdirect. It always helps to have a place to start.

She tips up her cup and thinks about ordering another espresso. Beyond the bushy garlands and fairylights the clouds are clearing, though, and the mellow Christmas soundtrack has started to repeat itself already. Zoe says something about another appointment and Maxine nods and looks around for her purse. She’s got Zoe’s number. She can track Zoe down again.

“Oh, by the way,” she says, remembering. “I was going to ask, have you seen John lately? You know, John Anderson. I had a story I was hoping he could help with, but he seems to have changed his number. Do you know how I can get in touch?”

Zoe’s fishing for her phone, probably to call her driver; she stops, sits back, gives Maxine a flatly assessing look. “Our mutual friend John?” she says eventually. “He’s hard on phones. He probably dropped it somewhere. What sort of help did you need?”

“It’s an accounting scandal. Well, I hope it will be. It’s more exciting than it sounds. I could use an actuary. Have you got his new number?”

Zoe opens her mouth, then closes it again, then says, “Is that what he’s doing these days? I don’t think I do have his current number, sorry. But if I see him, I’ll let him know you were looking for him.” She hesitates, glancing at Maxine with a distinctly curious gleam. “I take it things didn’t work out? I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be,” Maxine says blithely. “He didn’t change his number to get away from me, if that’s what you thought. I broke it off. He’s sweet, but I really don’t have time for that right now.” Especially not for a man who’s still hung up on another woman, specifically one Zoe Morgan, not that Maxine’s going to say that to Zoe’s face. She’s wondering if Zoe might be just a bit hung up on John Anderson too.

“You are a busy woman,” Zoe says. “I’m sure John was sorry, though.”

“He took it very well. I couldn’t blame him if he was relieved, to be honest, after the whole Zambrano fiasco. He was very good about it, but you can’t tell me he wanted to be shot at and beaten up by HR thugs on a carousel. I doubt you have to deal with that sort of thing in actuary...ing... whatever it is actuaries actually do. He never told me how you two met, by the way. It wasn’t through Match-Heart.com, was it?”

“No,” Zoe says. “I do freelance work for his company occasionally. Sometimes we have clients in common. We met on a job involving a pharmaceutical company. It’s not a very interesting story.”

Maxine’s itching to ask all about Zoe’s clients, especially the ones Zoe has in common with John Anderson’s expensive actuarial firm, but Zoe’s given her as much as she’s going to today and Maxine has work of her own waiting back at the office, so she nods and lets it go. She’s already planning how to approach Zoe’s new leads. It’s a pity Maxine couldn’t have recorded this conversation, but Zoe’s not the sort of contact who takes kindly to being put on the record and Maxine’s pretty sure this is a relationship that’s going to work out well for both of them. She’s not going to burn it until she’s got as much out of Zoe as she can.

She starts to pull her damp coat back on. “By the way,” Zoe says, crossing her legs and leaning back in her armchair with an amused upwards glance, “I heard there was another big story you were after. How’s the hunt for the Man in the Suit going?”

Maxine has to laugh. “Please,” she says. “Who told you that? I dropped him weeks ago.”

“Did you? Why?”

“Urban legend,” Maxine says confidently. “After the Zambrano thing, I decided if the guy existed I’d have met him by now. I almost got killed and did I see a single superhero in a snappy suit? No offense to John, but a nice actuary with glasses and a dog from a dating website doesn’t really cut it. Though he did his best, bless him. And the third date was fun, though I never did find out what that car was compensating for.”

She remembers the car with regret. She _liked_ the car. She liked the dog, too, and John’s place was the best advertisement for an actuarial career she’d ever seen, but really she doesn’t have the time. She pays the bill and heads for the door. The look on Zoe’s face follows her all the way back to the office.


	2. 'John Warren'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nicholas Donnelly has his own CIA contacts, because of course he does. Much good will that do him. (2x12, 'Prisoner's Dilemma'.)

Four and a half minutes after Donnelly clicks send, his cell phone rings. “Jesus, Nick,” says the voice at the other end, in a low and urgent tone that tells Donnelly his old college roommate is leaning forwards with his hand cupped across his mouth, because this is one call Tom will not want overheard in the office, “that’s John Reese. Yeah, he’s one of ours. Where are you holding him?”

Donnelly rubs his gritty eyes and permits himself a moment’s satisfaction. Nothing else is going right, because nothing ever does when the man in the suit’s involved, but he’d picked Door Number 4 as soon as he’d seen the lineup at the bank and ten minutes into their respective interrogations he’d been certain of it. Donnelly’s spent a lot of time staring at grainy photographs and a handful of stills from the hotel footage that had mysteriously (infuriatingly) corrupted, but that’s not what gave ‘John Warren’ away. It’s how the man doesn’t match the other three that does it. He’s older, for one thing, and calmer, and not nearly angry enough to be a wrongfully detained investment banker. He’s far too comfortable on the sunny side of an interrogation desk. The other suspects started out aggressive and got more so; ‘John Warren’ opened with an appeal for sympathy and progressed rather fast to flirting with his interrogator. To Donnelly that says CIA, not common-or-garden ex-military thug.

It also says something Donnelly’s still not ready to hear about Detective Carter, who’s got too much experience to let a suspect control an interrogation. He’d _wanted_ to trust her. He really had. “Rikers,” he says. “He’s calling himself John Warren. Is Reese his real name?”

“Shit, no, just his work name, but it’s as good as. I don’t know who he was before he joined the Company. Rikers, Nick, seriously? These guys break out of prisons for fun. What have you got on him?”

In Donnelly’s other ear, Carter’s running through a lot of probably false personal information with the sandy-haired man who is definitely not a small business owner, while ‘John Warren’, temporarily abandoned, twiddles his thumbs. Donnelly frowns. “Not enough. Evidence has gone missing, been tampered with. He’s got powerful friends. What do you know about him?”

“He used to run black ops with Kara Stanton and Mark Snow,” Tom says. “Cleanup jobs, mostly. But Stanton and Reese got retired in China in 2010, with prejudice, I heard. They did it all. Wet work, rendition, sabotage, drug trafficking, anything else you can think of. If you want a poster boy for CIA excesses, Reese is your man.”

“When you say ‘retired’...”

“You know the Company’s retirement plan for guys like Reese, Nick. All I know is there’s two stars on the wall and someone in Finance supposedly had to sign off on a cruise missile.” Tom’s voice drops another notch. “You said something about friends. Has Stanton surfaced too?”

“We know he’s not working alone. I believe he’s working for an independent intelligence organisation, possibly with Chinese connections, but I haven’t yet identified which one. He certainly has links to organised crime. We don’t have much on his other associates, though. Do you think he and Stanton might be working together?”

“If she’s even alive,” Tom says. “But if Reese made it out... listen, Nick, Reese is a tough son of a bitch, but Kara Stanton... let’s just say _he_ was the good cop. You take care.”

He hangs up. Donnelly swings his chair absently and stares at his screen. Everything about ‘John Warren’ checks out, which says a lot for Reese’s current employers, but nothing that might actually trace back to them, unfortunately. Donnelly could probably pin the bank job on ‘John Warren’, but that’s not who he’s after here. He wants John Reese, former CIA hitman, current freelance operator and murderer for hire. He wants to shine a light on the rotten heart of the CIA and the invisible forces massing against his country. And he wants to nail the mole in his own operation. If he’d been going after Al Capone, he wouldn’t have settled for tax evasion. He’s not going to settle for anything less than the real thing now.

It might take some lateral thinking. Reese is too good to break under interrogation, which brings Donnelly back to Carter and just how relaxed she was in that interrogation room. At moments, she might have been having a friendly conversation. She’d actually seemed interested in what ‘John Warren’ had to say.

She hadn’t approached any of the other suspects like that. Donnelly hates it, but he thinks he’s well on the way to achieving his secondary objective too, even if he can’t prove that yet either.

But he will. He always does, in the end.

Maybe, he thinks, there’s another way in there.


	3. A Pocket Full of Lye

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Afterwards Harold invites John in rather firmly to discuss his new responsibilities as field supervisor/role model over a cup of tea.

Reese is late for work, but he brings doughnuts. “Bit of a queue,” he says, which Shaw takes to mean he got caught up in one of his private stalking projects. She’s followed him following Carter and Fusco a couple of times and of course she knows he follows her too, although she hasn’t caught him at it more than once; he takes more care when he’s dealing with a fellow professional. He tosses a treat to Bear, who slavers shamelessly, then checks himself when he sees the photo taped to the library board. “Didn’t we already deal with this guy? Before we met you, Shaw. I handed him over to Lionel myself.”

“Should’ve just shot him,” Shaw says. Finch glares at her. “What?”

“Unfortunately, Mr. Reese, he was acquitted yesterday,” Finch says. “It seems the jury was unpersuaded of his guilt. I haven’t yet been able to ascertain why Mr. Jackson’s number has come up now, but given his history the balance of probability would be that he’s our perpetrator. As you know, his criminal connections are extensive.”

“Uh huh,” Reese says. He’s still examining the photo on the board; he seems slightly distracted. “Shaw and I can run surveillance. Don’t you have an appointment to get to?”

Finch gives Reese a suspicious look. “Yes, actually,” he says, after a moment. “I’m sure if anything comes up you’ll let me know.”

*

In the car, Shaw grabs her third apple doughnut and says, “This guy killed a kid and her father in a hit-and-run?”

“Yep,” Reese says.

“Then put a hit on the kid’s mother to cover it up?”

“Yep,” Reese says. He’s bouncing a marshal’s star absently on the dashboard. It’s slightly dented; it looks real.

“Why can’t we just shoot him in the face?”

“Just a minute,” Reese says. He clicks his earwig. Shaw assumes he’s calling Finch, but then he says, “Hey Joss, you remember Terry Jackson? ... Yeah, we heard. Didn’t we get you a taped confession? ... Right, sure, I’ll try to bear that in mind. Thanks, Joss. You take care.” He clicks off. “She says coerced confessions are inadmissible as evidence.”

“And you should remember that next time?”

“And I should remember that next time.”

“So this guy’s not going to prison?”

“Nope,” Reese says.

“So we’re back to the shooting him in the face option?”

“Yep,” Reese says.

Shaw sits up. She hadn’t actually expected him to agree. “How?”

“Two ways,” Reese says. “First way takes longer. Marshal Jennings –” he flips his badge so it catches the light “– knows a guy at Torreón Penitentiary. We put Jackson in the trunk, pick up a brick of coke and take a road trip.”

“Where do we get the coke?”

“My place.” He shrugs off the look Shaw gives him. “Got tired of shaking down the cartel every time I needed to frame someone.”

“Right,” Shaw says. She’s not impressed, exactly, but it’s a level of cold-blooded competence she has to appreciate. She’d got the impression Finch’s operation was a lot more squeamish about this sort of thing.

She gives Reese another look. He’s definitely done this before. “What’s the second way?”

“I’ve got a ton of lye in a storage unit. Took it off a doctor before she could make the worst mistake of her life. It’s quicker and no one’s going to ask questions about why we went out of town for a week.”

Shaw digests that. “So, wait,” she says. “I’m not allowed to take shots to centre mass, but you’re allowed to dissolve people? That doesn’t seem fair.”

There’s a sudden, urgent noise over the comms. Shaw winces and jabs her finger in her ear, then holds her earwig a slightly less deafening inch away. It’s practically vibrating. “Mr. Reese!” Finch is saying. He sounds rather short of breath. “This is _not_ how we do things! You’re setting a very bad example for Miss Shaw!”

Reese sighs. “Harold,” he says. “Are you spying on us?”

“I really don’t think that’s the important thing here, Mr. Reese!” Finch says. “You are not going to shoot Terry Jackson and dissolve his body in lye!”

“He’s a bad man, Harold,” Reese says, almost dreamily. “He’s done bad things. Someone should do something.”

“Certainly, Mr. Reese, but as you’re very well aware –”

“Sorry, Harold, can’t hear you. You’re breaking up. Are you going through a restaurant? I hear the fish is good.”

He clicks his earwig off, then pulls his phone out and strips out the battery too. Shaw watches, curious. She’s still piecing together how this operation functions; not who pays and who hits people and who keeps the cops off their backs, that’s obvious, but how Finch’s little team actually fits together. Every time she goes on a job with Reese and Finch, she’s trusting her life to them. She has to know how they’ll react when things go sideways. She’s not sure if Reese directly disobeying Finch’s orders counts as ‘sideways’, although it’s certainly not what she would have predicted. It makes things more interesting, that’s for sure.

She says, “You do that often?”

“Actually, the last time I did that, I ended up in Rikers,” Reese says. “But if that happens again, I’m sure you can break me out.” He bounces Marshal Jennings’s star one final time, then sighs again and drops it back into his inside pocket. “Road trip?”


	4. Clean Sweep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Let's assume Control was less impressed with Shaw's performance than Special Counsel. That probably means no one's getting out of Ordos alive.

After Kara catches John Reese pulling out Daniel Casey’s teeth and is obliged to shoot both of them and dump their bodies in the river, she gets a new partner on temporary secondment from the ISA. She’s not sure what the reasoning is there, but the woman’s got a perfect military pedigree plus more medical training than John ever had, so Kara figures she’s meant to break Sameen Shaw in for fieldwork and hand her back to the ISA with freshly cut teeth and a collection of inter-agency contacts. Babysitting duty isn’t exactly the CIA’s way to say, “Thanks for killing your partner of four years; we appreciate your job commitment and acknowledge that your impeccable service record remains unstained,” but fine, whatever. Kara had expected to land on the watchlist for a while. She can live with that.

Shaw’s good. She’s a natural, really, and Kara realises at once that Shaw’s not going to need any speeches about walking in the dark, or being it. Shaw doesn’t need to hear she’s doing the right thing. Shaw knows she is, or doesn’t care, or hasn’t thought about it much one way or the other. Shaw does her job, and does it well. She enjoys her work. She doesn’t ask questions. Kara has to appreciate that.

It’s different, though. Well, of course it is. It’s probably unfair for Kara to compare Shaw to John, but Kara worked with John for years, so screw that, she’s going to do it anyway. She’d got used to John worrying over what a target might have done and breathing down Kara’s neck when she really got going in an interrogation session. Shaw only yawns. She seems, if anything, hungry. There’s none of the friction that had livened up working with John, even if there’s no need to worry about Shaw doing something stupid that might compromise Kara either. Shaw’s a good little soldier. She’s never going to get caught faking a target’s death.

Kara thinks John had always known it was going to be Kara who put him down eventually. He hadn’t seemed all that sorry about it. Better her, Kara supposes, than one of Mark’s goons with a sniper rifle in some dark alley. At least this way someone who’d known John knew what had happened to him. “Sorry, John,” she’d said. “It’s not personal. You just got careless.” He’d actually smiled. “Sorry, John,” she’d muttered again, as his body disappeared into the dark.

It’s going to take a while to get used to working with someone else. There’s no point in getting too attached to Shaw, though, because she’s going back to the ISA at some point and then Kara will be assigned a real partner to knock into shape, just as she knocked John more or less into shape over the years. They wrap up the Moroccan job with time to spare. “Ordos, China,” Mark says, and Kara’s got to admit she’s glad it’s Shaw who’ll have her back on this one, rather than some new kid straight from the Farm. Kara doesn’t know Shaw yet like she knew John, but she’s confident in Shaw’s ability to handle herself in the field.

Besides, Kara does know one thing about Sameen Shaw. Unlike John, Shaw follows orders. On a job like this, that’s no small thing.


	5. Cover Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zoe's used to John turning up in different disguises. That's why it's the second time she runs into Detective Riley that throws her. (S4, somewhere between 4x14, "Guilty", and 4x19, "Search and Destroy".)

The next time Zoe runs into John, he’s arresting her client for murder. “Zoe,” he says, and she says, “John,” and manages not to cover her eyes, because if John’s involved the job must be more complicated than she thought. But it’s not. He’s _still_ a cop. He’s got a warrant. Lionel Fusco is handling the handcuffs. No one seems to be whispering in anyone’s ear.

“How’s the girlfriend?” she asks, mostly in the hope of throwing John off his game, and he gives her the twisted half-smile that lost him quite a lot at poker the last time they played. She tips her head at her vanishing client. “Are you working?”

“What does it look like?”

“Harold involved?”

“Not on this one,” John says. “I can hack an email account on my own.”

Zoe files that away as something her client’s lawyers may be able to use, because she’s pretty sure hacking’s not a legal way to gather evidence, although she’s also thinking she really needs to stop working for people who’d rather hire a hitman than pay alimony. Some jobs just aren’t worth the money. Maybe she’ll put the effort into working out what John’s doing these days instead. She should have asked more questions when she met him at the courthouse. “The badge does look good on you, John,” she says. “Is it yours?”

“Would you believe I worked undercover in Narcotics for four years?” John says.

She thinks about it. “No,” she says. “No, I wouldn’t.”

He gives her his other smile, the real one. “Try,” he suggests. “Got to go. Work calls. I’ll see you around.”


	6. Terra Incognita

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One of these days, Iris is going to have to deal with the fact that what she doesn't know about John Riley is just as important as what she does know. It'll probably have to wait until after he gets out of hospital, though.

John’s not at his desk. His partner is. Iris hesitates, because she thinks she should probably walk straight on by and pretend she was only here to use the photocopier, but then Detective Fusco glances up from rifling through John’s top drawer and it’s too late. Lionel. Fusco’s first name is Lionel. John generally uses it when he mentions his partner, which is a bit unusual, Iris finds, among cops.

She makes a conscious effort not to hug her files. “Hello, detective,” she says. “I don’t think we’ve spoken since the gala. How have you been?”

“Me? Great. Yeah. Never better.” Lionel Fusco heaves a stack of paperwork from John’s desk to his own. He actually looks like he hasn’t slept for days. “You checking up on Wonderboy?”

“What, John? No, no, I... just had a spare moment, and he missed an appointment yesterday, so I thought I’d see if he was here today. He hasn’t returned my call.”

Maybe Iris shouldn’t have said that. She would have said it about any other patient, though, so she doesn’t think she’s giving anything away. And John doesn’t always keep his appointments, even now, but he does normally get back to Iris with some sort of belated explanation these days, so after the fourth unanswered text and the second call straight to voicemail she’d had to wonder if there was something going on.

She studies Fusco’s face. “Oh, right,” he says, studying her right back. “You didn’t hear.”

“Hear what? I haven’t heard anything from John.”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t. He was probably freezing to death at the time.”

“He was _what_?”

“He got shot,” Fusco says succinctly. “Chasing a psycho killer through the Catskills with no backup. So I get up there and find one dead guy, one unconscious suspect, and Mr. Good Team Player talking to ghosts outside in the car, because he’s too much of a big damn hero to tell anyone where he’s going.”

He seems personally aggrieved by this. Iris thinks she’s going to have to sit down. “Is he –? John’s not...?”

“Dead? Nah,” Fusco says, and Iris does sit down, rather abruptly, in John’s empty chair. The whole busy precinct blurs momentarily, light and colour and sound swimming together into something sickly. Iris clutches her files until it passes. “He’s at the New York General. He’ll be fine. This sort of thing happens to him every other week.”

_“Almost dying?”_

Fusco gives her another curious look. “He’s still seeing you, isn’t he?” he says. “What the hell else does he talk to you about?”

*

Iris cancels her next appointment. On the way to the hospital, she has time to resent how cavalier Fusco was about John _almost dying_ and to wonder how well John gets on with his partner. Maybe Fusco feels threatened by John. Iris hadn’t picked up on any workplace related friction in John’s sessions, other than John’s rocky relationship with his paperwork, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

She’s moved onto the conversation she’s going to have with John once he’s up and about again, featuring familiar phrases like ‘hero complex’ and ‘death wish’ and ‘do you really think, John’ and ‘IA is still watching you’, by the time she pushes through the glass doors. There’s a map of the hospital by the elevators and Iris is examining it when a young woman steps out, moves past her, then stops and says, “Dr. Campbell? It is Dr. Campbell, isn’t it? From the Academy?”

Iris doesn’t recognise Dani Silva at first. “Yes, that’s me,” she says, since being name-checked by unfamiliar cops is one of the hazards of her job. The girl must have been in one of her classes. “How are –” and then Iris remembers following John down the street into a shootout, and afterwards locking herself into her office to drink a great deal of terrible precinct tea and think very seriously about whether it might be worth arranging some therapy for herself as well.

And calling John the next morning, after she’d heard about the undercover cop and the mole. Remembering it, Iris realises John never did explain exactly what he’d done there.

The cop who’d been in trouble, Dani Silva, says, “Good, thanks. You here to visit Detective Riley? He’s asleep. I left a card.” She must have seen Iris’s surprise; she adds, “I saw his file when I was with IA. Said he was one of yours.”

“Oh – I see. Is he...?”

“They said he’s doing well. Hypothermia and blood loss.” Dani speaks through her teeth, like someone with something to prove. Iris finds it slightly off-putting. “I’m Dani Silva, by the way. Riley and his partner helped me out a couple of times. You probably don’t remember me.”

“No, I do,” Iris says. “You were the one at the Academy – well, there was all that shooting. I was there for that.”

“Oh yeah, and then Riley put you in a taxi,” Dani says, breaking out in a grin, as if she had just identified a shared experience that gave them something in common, rather than a brief and upsetting moment of unexpected violence that still keeps Iris up at night. This, Iris thinks, is why she took the therapist route after graduating from the Academy. “I guess you did sign off on him in the end, or he wouldn’t even have been on this case. Fusco said he got the guy, though. At least, they’re working on the assumption that the guy Riley shot did it until Riley or the other guy wakes up long enough to file a report.”

John shot someone. Of course John shot someone before or while or after being shot and almost dying of hypothermia. Iris would really like to lock herself into her office _right now_. Instead, she says brightly, “Good, I’m sure IA will take that into consideration.”

Dani laughs. “Hey, I gave him a clean report card,” she says. “To go with all the other fictions in his file.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, come on. The guy’s got special forces training. He said his instructor was ex-military, but his dog’s scuba-certified and he busted us out of a Trinitario base by blowing up a swimming pool with the grenade belt he brought along with him. There’s no way he hasn’t done that before. And that’s not in his file.”

Dani has clearly put some thought into this. Iris is seriously torn about what to react to first. She settles faintly for, “Dogs can get scuba certificates?”

“If you believe Riley,” Dani says. “Yeah, look, I didn’t put all that in my report, okay? Riley got me out of a really tough spot. He and Fusco are the good guys. You won’t tell anyone, will you, Dr. Campbell?”

Therapists are a lot like priests in some ways. Iris is used to people spilling secrets to her wherever she is; she thinks just knowing she’s a therapist makes people feel they have a right to the safe embrace of doctor-patient confidentiality, even when they are not in fact her patients. “No, of course not,” she murmurs, while terrifying visions of John Riley juggling grenades dance across her vision. Where would he even have got them? She’s sure grenades (grenades!) aren’t standard issue ordnance. “I’m sure whatever’s in John’s file, he had a good – he blew up a _swimming pool_?”

“Tight spot,” Dani says, with a meaningful twist of her mouth. “Sorry, I have to go, I’m on my lunch break. It was good to see you, Dr. Campbell. If you run into Fusco at the Eighth, would you tell him I said hi?”

Dani heads off. Iris steps into the elevator and stares at her reflection.

She feels unsettled. Talking to Dani has amplified the sense of discontinuity instilled by Fusco’s casual suggestion that John runs into near-death situations on a fortnightly basis. John is fearless, Iris knows, and ‘fearless’ can be another word for ‘reckless’, especially when written down in a report alongside a tally of injuries and property damage. IA didn’t send John to Iris on a whim. But Iris knows John Riley. She’s read his file. His shoots are all good shoots; there are too many of them, but his violence is under tight control. She’s heard about his childhood and his ex and Joss Carter, the cop he couldn’t save last year. John didn’t want to end up in Iris’s office and he was difficult at first, but a lot of cops are. Since then, he’s told Iris things she’s sure he never opened up to anyone else about before.

He never told her he had a dog. He might have said he was a dog person.

He never mentioned the swimming pool.

The thing is, they don’t talk much about what they do. Iris can’t talk about her work, for obvious reasons, and John, well, outside the therapy that’s not really happening any more, John’s typical conversational strategy is to ask Iris about herself, which works because it’s flattering and also because Iris is a therapist. She spends all day listening to other people talking about their problems. It’s nice to be the centre of someone else’s attention for once. And it’s unusual for a man to really listen to a woman, especially an older man. It’s what John did the first time Iris found him waiting in her office, when he brought Iris coffee and asked about her cat. Iris thinks she’d be happier if she hadn’t just realised that.

Iris knows the difference between someone looking for a quick way out of her office and someone honestly opening up to her. It did cross Iris’s mind once or twice that John might have realised the difference too, but only during their early sessions. It’s a long time since Iris last caught the momentary head-tilt that suggests John’s asking himself the undercover cop’s favourite question, “Who am I today?”

The elevator doors open. Iris walks down the wards until she finds John’s bed. He’s still asleep. There are several cards. One of them appears to be handmade. TO LURCH, it says, in rounded rainbow felt-tip letters. Iris doesn’t read what’s inside, although she’s tempted. She hadn’t known John had family in New York. He’d never mentioned it.

She wishes she’d stopped to get something for John now. She’d assumed he’d be awake. She’s got a notebook in her purse; she’ll leave a note.

First, though, she stands at the foot of the bed, watching John sleep. He looks exhausted and old and bloodless. Iris has never seen John without gelled hair before. Almost as much as the missing suit, it makes him look undressed.

She knows _him_. She’s sure he’s a good person. She wants to believe that’s what matters.

She knows it’s a problem that there are feelings involved, _her_ feelings. She knows she should have insisted John actually saw the other therapist she’d referred him to. She knows it’s possible to be a good person who makes bad decisions, and if she thought about it she’d have to admit she really doesn’t know much about the decisions that led to John spending four years undercover in Narcotics before transferring to Homicide. She does now know that John’s partner considers John almost dying to be business as usual and that a former IA cop doesn’t trust John’s IA file. Also: dog, grenades, _swimming pool_. It’s so outlandish. It makes it harder to believe in the Detective John Riley who sits across from Lionel Fusco at the Eighth Precinct and complains about his paperwork. Although since John’s release from desk duty, of course, he’s only rarely there.

Iris has heard John say there are no good or bad people, only good or bad decisions. Some therapists, Iris knows, would take John’s fixation with making good decisions as an indication that he’d made a lot of bad ones at some point in his life.

She wants to smooth the white sheets under his white hands. She wants to have a very serious conversation with John about the underlying reasons why he just can’t stop himself from running towards danger. She wants to remind him he can’t save everyone. She wants to believe that who John is can be separated from the things John does.

She knows he can’t be. And she doesn’t know what to do with all the little details that don’t quite add up. She thinks about how she thinks she loves John, but sometimes she feels like she’s going to suffocate under the weight of all the things he hasn’t told her, especially on days like today, when everyone else seems to know more about John than her.


End file.
